That’s when I first heard the Gaza Strips. It says something of these four young men and one woman that their eponymous debut album announces itself with the left-right-left knockout punches of those ...

Just a short drive from the Portuguese university town of Coimbra, in Vale de Canas, a sea of eucalypts extends to the horizon in all directions. The tallest tree in Europe sprouted here 120 years ago ...

Paul Kelly and the Dots. Turns out they’ve got the residency, every Friday night at the Kingston Hotel. And Friday night rolls around fast, so before you know it you’re back there checking them out ...

Many years ago in Sydney, moments before I was due on stage, the stage manager breezily mentioned that the composer might be in the audience. I fled to the bathroom and locked the door, scanning the ...

Cape York’s palm cockatoos teaching drumming techniques to their young are an example of the emerging field of animal cultures ...

One hot afternoon in February 2014, in the pleasant Victorian township of Tyabb, south-east of Melbourne, an 11-year-old boy called Luke Batty was playing in the nets after cricket practice with his ...

The children left behind by Australian sex tourists in the Philippines The sky bruises at the same time each day in Angeles City. Then the rain comes. The weather is so similar – steamy heat, then ...

His true name is nowhere recorded, nor his date of birth. Born in the Hunter Valley around 1833, he was known to his white employer simply as Jackey Jackey. A clever and skilful lad, he was ...

When I moved to Australia from Canada as a child, I was struck by the shape of my new home. In Canada I had to draw maps of my native land in exacting detail. This skill atrophied at my Sydney primary ...

I am a restless and disgruntled visitor to museums, not much interested in the engineered detail of an artefact but more in how it fits into the big picture. When I see the 1785 Boulton and Watt steam ...

In 1960, when Robin Boyd published his attack on the stylistic cowardice of our suburbs, it took courage to call Australia ugly. The country has never bragged about its beauty, as America loudly does ...

We live today in a far more conservative world than the world Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were striving for. These are censorious times; it would be harder today to publish the kind of ...